Partitions and chain layout

[tsloughter]

Currently partitions are basically not used. Everything is hard-coded to only have 1 partition, 0.

With the way topics are laid out across chains through sorting it occurred to me there is no good way to support partitions as simply suffixes on the topic, since they would all be bunched together on the same chain.

Is there a way to support partitions in such a way that they will be spread apart? If not, we likely should make partitions confined to the kafka protocol and remove all other current usage.

[evanmcc]

given that partitions are largely for read throughput, and we have other ways of spreading read load, I would prefer that we just relegate them to an ignored protocol detail like you say at the end there.

[tsloughter]

I thought they were mostly for write throughput, hehe.